InfiniteTides

While perusing my blog’s stats the other day, I noticed that I was getting more and more visits from people using a browser called Flock. I wouldn’t say that the number of hits was exactly at critical mass, but it was a large enough percentage that I finally decided to give Flock a go myself. If you are into the social networking scene, this is definitely the browser you should be using.

First off, someone should tell the makers of this browser that the name is rubbish. Actually, it’s even a little insulting (though perhaps appropriate) as it suggests that people are merely flocking to various social networking and blog sites using their browser. With that said, I’ll try to keep my biases to a minimum in this review.

The very first thing I noticed after installing Flock (on openSUSE 10.3 w/KDE 4.0) is how busy the window is. There are many frames withing the browser. So many that one barely knows where to begin! The first thing you should do is import your bookmarks from your current favorite browser. After that, I strongly recommend that you check out Flock’s “Getting Started” page to get a better idea of everything going on within the browser window.

After you wrap your brain around all of the clutter bells and whistles, you definitely need to customize (right click on the toolbar). I added the new tab button, changed icons to icons and text, and removed the search bar (because Google is my home page).

The first bit of actual content I noticed was the My World page. This tab shows Favorite Sites, Favorite Feeds, Favorite Media, a search bar, and has a bunch of links across the top. The links open different things (duh!) either on the sidebar, across the top of the browser, or in the main browser window. So many freaking links! At first, this really bothered me, because it seems way too busy and cluttered to be useful. They are a little overwhelming at first, but once you become familiar with what each of them does, they become very useful to quickly bounce around within the browser and around the WWW.

One niggly little issue I had was while manually adding all of my favorite Sage (Mozilla add-on) RSS feeds. Flock wanted to switch the sidebar over to the Feeds tab instead of staying in my Favorites tab (where my Sage RSS feeds are). Then I used my brain and exported the feeds from Mozilla, then imported them in Flock. That was soooo much easier! Importing my RSS feeds took some time, because it seemed to be validating and updating each one as it added them to the feed list. Right now I’m using the built-in Flock feed reader, because it works fairly well.  I’m trying to figure out how to get my imported RSS feeds to show up in my Favorite Feeds on the My World page.

I’ll post more tomorrow when I’ve had more time to check out more features.